How Does Stress Affect Women and Men Differently? Video Transcript

I think we’re beginning to understand that the differences between men and women from what is commonly known as stress, is significantly different. We are talking about dealing with early identification of cardiovascular risk in women as we have done in men. Men oftentimes will develop chest pain as their first symptom for underlying cardiovascular disease. Well, we’ve learned that women do not identify chest pain. Oftentimes, they identify fatigue and shortness of breath as their first symptom related to cardiovascular disease. And, oftentimes, women will subscribe to stress as simply being very fatigued. The other thing that I think is different between men and women and stress, has to do with hormonal changes. Menopause creates a significant drop in hormones for both men and women. In women, we see significant amount of depression and depression-like symptoms when they go through hormonal changes. I think that as we move forward in the next several years, you will begin to see that the identification of women undergoing different patterns of stress and identifying different symptoms may improve in the identification of early signs of depression, early signs of cardiovascular disease and overall early signs of poor functionality that women have long been forgotten and have been undertreated for by the medical profession.